If it were not so serious there would be something ludicrous about the reaction of the green lobby to the discovery of big shale gas reserves in this country. Here we are in the fifth year of a downturn. We have pensioners battling fuel poverty. We have energy firms jacking up their prices. We have real worries about security of energy supply  a new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester. Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion  more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britains needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass  their collective oomph wouldnt pull the skin off a rice pudding. We are prevented from putting in a new system of coal-fired power stations, since that would breach our commitments under Kyoto. We are therefore increasingly and humiliatingly dependent on Vladimir Putins gas or on the atomic power of the French state.

I always get a laugh out of this claim. We started hydraulic fracturing back in the late 1940s.

The recent technology advance that really made the difference was horizontal steerable drilling. When combined with hydraulic fracturing, these shale plays that were uneconomic before and now money (and oil/gas) makers.

The shale deposit under Blackpool in northern England is 50-percent greater than previously thought, according to weekend reports in the UK press.

The Times newspaper reported Friday night that the British Geological Survey has concluded that the approximately 380 square miles covered by the Bowland Basin to the east of Blackpool contains some 300 trillion cubic feet of gas. A previous estimate, made in September 2011 by Cuadrilla Resources, suggested there could be 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the area.

A spokesman for the British Geological Survey confirmed to Rigzone Monday that a report on shale gas resources had been prepared by the organization for the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, but that the contents would not be revealed until DECC publishes them in the New Year.

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